


And Then There Were...

by papersandals (laronmi)



Series: Elibe Modern Verse [1]
Category: Fire Emblem, Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-04
Updated: 2012-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-30 14:09:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laronmi/pseuds/papersandals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Modern AU. Erk goes on an archeological dig in Nabata. It's somehow worse than he anticipated, what with the car breaking down in the desert, the sunstroke, and the dragon bones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Then There Were...

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Samuraiter for the beta job. Written for the first round of the Fire Emblem Big Bang.

His car was dead. He was stranded in the middle of Nabata with only a large-brim hat and a thin layer of sunscreen for protection. His duffel bag weighed twenty pounds, and he had only three bottles of water on him. His GPS still worked, which was the only good thing going for him, because according to the device, the camp was still nine miles away.  
  
Nine measly miles away. It would have taken less than fifteen minutes if his car still worked.  
  
Erk sighed and fanned himself with the hat before reaching back and grabbing his bag. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since the air conditioning died with the rest of his car, but the heat had stockpiled quickly thanks to the glass windows, and the lack of air circulation didn’t make things better. He grabbed a towel and wiped the sweat off his face and neck, put his hat back on his head, tightened the grip on his bag, and then opened the door.  
  
The desert was hotter than the car. Erk resisted the urge to shut the door and placed one foot onto the desert. He ground down on the sand until he was certain that there was enough traction, placed his hands on the car exterior, hissed in pain, and then decided to wait just a little while longer inside until his hands stopped burning.  
  
What was that idiom Louise was always saying? That hindsight was 20/20? Remembering the phrase didn’t make him wish any less that he’d stopped to consider why the people in the checkpoint town asked him eight times if he wanted to rent one of their vehicles before giving him his passport back. He had been so rushed, so concerned about already being two days late to the dig, that he just brushed off their questions and plowed ahead without stopping to think. His little car was fine for driving around the cities of Etruria, but in the harsh Nabata sun, with the sand flying everywhere and getting into the nitty-gritty of the engine, the poor thing never stood a chance. It was almost funny how the one time Erk didn’t overthink a situation, something like getting stranded in a desert happened.  
  
“Yeah,” he muttered to himself, “because heat stroke and dehydration are hilarious, Erk. That’ll teach you to listen to Serra’s complaints about you seriously, won’t it?”  
  
He sighed and leaned back in the driver’s seat, his hat getting knocked off in the process. The heat had caused the sweat he wiped off to come back with friends, and they were throwing a party that involved dancing off his chin and diving on his shirt. It felt miserable in the car, but Erk had experienced for himself how much worse it was outside. He knew, logically, that he shouldn’t stay in his vehicle any more than he should, but the logical side of his brain was being kicked aside by heat as it cha-cha-ed its way around his body, hogging all of his mental attention in the process. He sighed again and let out a frustrated groan, staring at the car ceiling and trying to will himself to cool down. It didn’t work. Thinking about cold places just made the heat stand out even more, and pretending that he was cold just made him more irritable.  
  
So he sat up, grabbed the towel again with more ferocity and energy than he should have expended, wiped all the sweat off his body that he could get to, crammed his head inside the hat, grabbed the bag, kicked the door open, and launched himself into the desert.  
  
He tripped on the loose dunes and landed on his butt. He hissed as his hands made contact with the hot sands, and then jerkily stood back up. He wiped the sand off his hands on his khaki shorts as much as he could, and then squinted at the desert ahead of him. The heat made the distance shimmer and sway, a smooth pool of silver liquid taunting him at the horizon’s edge. A mirage, he knew, and he turned away from it to look another way. Other than a few taller-than-usual sand dunes, however, all directions looked the same to him, the mirages dancing seductively in front of his eyes. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his GPS, and kept his eyes on it as he walked in the direction it guided him, determined to not be disoriented by the desert’s trickery.  
  
He made it 300 feet before he had to stop. His shirt was soaked. His towel was soaked. Erk guzzled down half a bottle of water and wiped the sweat from his eyelashes. In the distance, the desert continued to dance, and the sand reflected the light like twinkling stars, creating the illusion that something or someone was moving around. Erk knew better than to believe what the desert showed him, though. Months before the excavation started, he had read numerous books on desert survival, and he thought himself prepared for the trip.  
  
Well, he would have been prepared if he had more time to prepare. Still, he knew about mirages, and he knew better than to fall for something as simple as one, so he kept his head bowed and his gaze locked to the GPS.  
  
The flashing lights were distracting, though. And one of them seemed to get bigger and brighter in his peripheral vision.  
  
Erk gritted his teeth and kept moving. He made it another 500 feet before he looked up. There was definitely something big shimmering in the distance. It didn’t look like it was part of the illusion, either. It was almost as if it sat above the mirage instead of being a part of it, although some of that could have been attributed to the fact that it was moving—Oh.  
  
Erk finished off a bottle of water and looked at the GPS. It was leading him towards the direction of the object. He looked up and decided to take it easy while walking, and managed only another 30 yards before Pent’s vehicle squealed to a stop, blasting sand thankfully away from Erk’s face.  
  
“There you are,” Pent said once he got the window rolled down. Blissfully cool air wafted out of it, and Erk leaned towards it in desperation. “We received a call forty minutes ago from the border patrol about a student who was driving in the desert in a compact. I was hoping that the car would make it to the camp, but when you didn’t get there— Well, it seems I was right to have come out.”  
  
“You are my favorite person in the entire world,” Erk said as Pent opened the passenger door for him. He climbed in and immediately stuck his face in front of the air conditioner.  
  
“Oh, I think Louise might be upset to hear that. Don’t do that, by the way. The sudden temperature change is bad enough; you don’t want to encourage your body to go into shock. Here,” Pent said, tossing him a towel he fetched from the back, “use this to wipe the sweat off your face.”  
  
“Thank you,” Erk said as he sat back in the seat and wiped off the sweat that hadn’t already soaked into his clothes. He sighed and placed the damp towel on the floor of the car. “You don’t know how relieved I am that I didn’t have to walk all the way to the camp.”  
  
Pent laughed. “So am I. It would have been very difficult to explain why our eldest son had to be sent back to civilization in a hospital helicopter.”  
  
He was prepared to protest a little about being called their son so naturally when he realized the modifier Pent used in front of it. “Eldest?”  
  
He wasn’t prepared for Pent’s smile, so wide and open that it commanded total attention on his face. Pent joked and laughed more than Erk was used to and far more than Erk himself actually did, but his smiles had always complemented the rest of his expression rather than steal all the attention away. Pent wasn’t reserved, because he was one of those people who genuinely enjoyed his life and wanted everyone else to know about it, but he wasn’t easy to read, either. The smile that he had on in the car, however, was open and as easy to read as a child’s—bright and warm and thoroughly honest.  
  
“I have excellent news, Erk! Louise is pregnant!”  
  
Erk stared at him in shock. “What?”  
  
“Louise is pregnant!” Pent laughed, and even that sounded different from the laughter of just a few moments ago. “I found out as she was seeing me off in the airport. I must have been quite a sight, grinning like a loon the entire trip here. She’s only a little over a month along, now, so we’ll be back with plenty of time to get things prepared for the baby.” He took his eyes off the road and looked at Erk, gaze full of pride and mirth. “You’re going to be an older brother in eight months!”  
  
Erk shoved aside his own reservations about being informally adopted and smiled back. “That’s wonderful! You two have been looking forward to this for a long time.”  
  
“It is wonderful! Although,” Pent said, sobering his expression, but not to the point where someone couldn’t read the obvious joy he felt, “I have to keep in mind that, for the moment, we need to focus on the excavation. They’ll be plenty of time for celebration afterward.”  
  
“Agreed,” Erk answered as the camp came into view. “Work should always first.”  
  
“It should not _always_ come first, but in this case, yes. We only have six weeks to find something valuable enough to justify being here.”  
  
“Were the ruins not valuable enough?”  
  
Pent sighed as he slowed down, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as he parked next to several other vehicles by the camp. “There are ruins buried all over the desert, so Nabata’s government compares finding ruins to—pardon the cliché saying—shooting fish in a barrel. That we were given permission at all to dig here was thanks only to Dean Athos’s influence. If we can’t find something unique to the area, it will be a long time before anyone gets the chance to try again.”  
  
Erk left the air-conditioned confines of Pent’s car with reluctance. The moment he stepped outside, the dry air blasted him with heat, and his body, not used to the rapid changes in temperature, protested. He wobbled and teetered as his head spun, and Erk then reached a hand out to stabilize himself, hissing in pain when his hand touched the hot roof of the car.  
  
Pent was in front of him in a few seconds, looking him over with concern as he helped Erk to stand upright. “Are you okay? I guess I really should have kept the car warmer.”  
  
“I’m fine,” Erk muttered, brushing Pent’s hand aside. “This has just been a terrible day.”  
  
It continued to be a terrible day. After the introductions and the explanations on how the solar panel’s electricity would be rationed—Each person gets three days a week and thirty minutes a day for charging electronics. Only one electronic device may be charged a day, even if the thirty minutes aren’t up. No one opens the fridge without permission, and leaving the door open for more than half a minute is punished through the revocation of charging rights for the next two days—Erk was led around camp in a tour, but his tour guide got distracted debating whether the shards a team had dug up were that of a pot or a plate, leaving Erk to bake in the sun, his pale skin having absorbed all of the sunscreen he put on long ago. By the time the tour was over, the sun was low on the western horizon, and Erk was turning an unappealing shade of bright red. Pent found him, handed him a plate of food and a tall glass of water, and then told him to turn in for the night.  
  
When Erk awoke, there was a large bottle of lotion and a small bottle of aspirin next to his sleeping bag. He sat up, wincing in pain as the movement caused his burns to hurt, and swallowed two aspirin pills dry.  
  
Applying the lotion and getting dressed took far longer than he wanted to, and he walked out stiffly from his tent as the other students and professors bustled around the excavation site. It was still early in the morning, so the remnants of the night’s chill could still be felt. He got called over to a pit by Pent, and Erk toddled over to the pit, cringing as he made his way in.  
  
“Look at this, Erk,” Pent said to him before Erk even had both feet on the ground. “We think this might be a cemetery of some kind. See these stones? The etchings have mostly faded, but you can still make out that someone chiseled in writing on them.”  
  
“Have we found any bones?” Erk asked as he straightened, the back of his knees aching as the skin there flexed. Pent nodded and delicately held out a long, thin sliver of something.  
  
“Human bones are some of the graves, yes. What’s most intriguing is the presence of these. They’re broken, but we can tell they’re too large to belong to anything human. We’re trying to find more of these types of bones so we can figure out what was buried here. Most of the artifacts discovered so far don’t seem to indicate that any type of large animal was held in reverence.”  
  
“Except dragons,” Erk said. It was meant to be a sarcastic remark, since the small towns and settlements around the Nabata Desert and its surrounding areas still practiced a sort of pagan worship of the mythical beasts. It had died off in recent years, but the appeal of such rituals drew conspiracy theorists and armchair myth scholars towards the area every year, and Nabata had indulged them in it, drawing in a surprisingly decent profit for such an otherwise unorganized country.  
  
The sarcasm, however, seemed to have an unintended effect. Pent exchanged looks with one of his colleagues, and Erk gaped at the two of them.  
  
“You can’t be serious. You think these are dragon bones.”  
  
“It’s just a hypothesis,” Pent said, laying the bone shard down with something akin to reverence. “There were some whole bones unearthed, and none of the three cryptozoologists or zooarchaeologists here have ever seen bones quite like them.”  
  
“We’re nowhere near a proper lab for them to examine these. Just because the bones can't be identified does not mean that we have to resort to unsubstantiated hypothesis such as dragons.”  
  
“I understand your point, I truly do,” Pent said, rising and clapping the sand from his gloves. “But imagine—just for a moment!—that these **were** in fact dragon bones. Would that not be the discovery of the century? And if these were in fact dragon bones belonging to actual dragons living here, then that would explain their presence found across all the artifacts uncovered so far, despite having no concrete proof that dragons were explicitly worshiped during the era.”  
  
His sunburn itched. “Nabatans worship dragons _now_. Would that not indicate that there was some sort of dragon worship in the past as well?”  
  
Pent frowned. “Erk, you should already know that has no bearing on—are you all right?”  
  
The pit was a lot smaller than he first realized. His head seemed to want to split open, and his arms and legs simultaneously felt burning hot and freezing cold. He realized suddenly that he hadn’t eaten breakfast, and the thought made him gag.  
  
“I think—no,” Erk said, then he fell sideways and landed in an undignified heap next to the bone shards.


End file.
